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Premiere sequences wont load in media encoder CS4. EVER.
Adobe Media Encoder wont load my exports ever.
I cant export anything. Adobe Media Encoder sits there loading for about an hour, then takes 3-4 hours to encode each sequence and 3 times out of 5, it stalls and stops working. I’ve tried unchecking “write XMP metadata on import”, i’ve tried avoiding blank spaces in the sequences, i’ve tried exporting to other formats (mpeg2, h264, avi, flv, whatever), i’ve done it all. Nothing works.
It’s a fairly large Premiere Project with about 15 tapes of HDV 1080i loaded into it. I have each tape in a sequence with some timecode burn-ins and 10 seconds of bars & tone at the start and at the end. Roughly an hour each. I need to export these to DVDs or quicktime movs or whatever so the writers can watch the stuff and put together an outline of each episode and etc.
Im working on an intel mac, 2.93Ghz intel core 2 duo, 4gb of RAM, plenty of hard drive space. The project is all HDV 1080. Adobe premiere CS4, Adobe media encoder CS4 version 4.1.0.107. I never had CS3 in this computer.
One possible problem is that the tapes where captured in a PC, but i’ve tried with media captured in a mac and it’s the same thing. Ive deleted preferences, cache’s, reinstalled, rebooted, cleaned permissions, erased all plugins, everything. It’s all as good as new, but it doesnt work.
I’ve wrestled with this for days and as a temp solution im using snapz pro x to record straight from premiere and i just play out each sequence from start to end. Its slow but it’s real-time and it works. It’s still ridiculous and im eventually going to need to export properly.
Im pretty pissed. Im spending way more time working around these bugs and technical problems than i am on editing, which is what im in this for.
Any suggestions or solutions?
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6 Replies
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Your computer would seem to be very light on spec to be working on such a large HDV project. I recently moved up to CS5 from CS4 using a Corei7 12Gb Ram PC setup. HDV works fine now because CS5 is fully 64 bit and uses memory completely differently. On the basis that windows will keep 2Gb for itself you are asking your dual core to process some pretty hefty chunks of mpeg with only 2Gb max free for CS4.
OK, that’s my opinion of your setup, how can you alleviate your bottle neck?
My experience is that ImporterprocessServer + MediaEncoder + Pproheadless + Premiere itself are all competing for resources. Look in task manager if you don’t agree.
Try this….before exporting to Media Encoder from the Premiere timeline, open Media Encoder independantly from either the task bar or start menu and let it load. Then switch back to Premiere and export your sequence(s)
ME often stalls completely or takes an age to load because of the memory bottleneck. This seems to alleviate it.
Try this first and tell us what happens.
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I forgot to add that you should update CS4 to V 4.2.1 and also make sure ME is the latest…every little helps!
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Patrick, my apologies..my sleepy eyes have suddenly registered INTEL MAC in your post.
Forget my bumblings over WINDOWS.
But my basic premise remains – the bottleneck for CS4 is still in terms of the way it uses resources. The fact that it takes so long for ME to work suggests this and I would try my suggestion to alleviate in any case.
Again apologies!
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Hey Andy!
Dont worry about it. And you were right, the activity window (mac version of task manager) shows all 4 applications going nuts. I tried out your workflow of having AME open from the start, and i’ve tried shutting down premiere after the project are exported to AME. It works! Ever so slightly, but it works. It still takes about 30 minutes for it to load and start encoding, and there’s still some dud mpeg’s that are screwing up some sequences here and there, but at least it’s moving along.Im probably going to take the hard drive to a bigger/faster computer and do these things overnight. My computer simply isnt cut out for this.
Strangely, i’ve had much larger HDV projects working on FCP just fine. Slow and clumsy, but still working.
Thanks a ton Andy!
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Keep us posted Patrick..it’s always good to hear solutions as opposed to endless problems. Of course, what we didn’t discuss was any effects loaded onto the HDV clips. This will also slow down immediate rendering time at least. In such a case it is critical to have your settings set to export using preview files. Otherwise the whole deal has to re-render as it’s exporting…very sloooooow!
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Do keep in mind that PPro on the Mac side is using strictly QuickTime as it’s media “engine” or whatever…
You said you’ve captured HDV on the Mac itself and had the same issues?
Andy is correct, BTW, the computer is a little light-duty for CS4/CS5…but I’d bet doubling the RAM would make a world of difference…it won’t run like a Nehalem machine, but having enough RAM so all the apps don’t need to swap so much is a huge advantage.
Even when each 32 bit app can only use 4GB, right now when the OS is running, then Premiere Pro…then Media Encoder needs to start up another instance of Premiere Pro so it can load the sequence, and allow you to still edit in the instance you have open (provided you have the horses to do this of course)…so PPro, PPro headless (ME’s instance) and Media Encoder are all sharing what’s left after the OS gets what it needs…less than GB per application is almost certain and less than a half GB is very likely…
This is an area where Mac users have had an advantage for a while. Having a 64 bit OS opens up the maximum recognizable RAM in the machine and allows even 32 bit apps to grab all the AM they can use at least…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,
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